This award to Cornell University funds a workshop to be hosted by The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC). The CASC community is the primary provider of advanced computing for the nation's academic researchers who require access to both high-end computing resources and expertise. Participants are leaders in advanced computing infrastructure at campus, regional, and national levels. Units that provide campus cyberinfrastructure (CI) face the challenges and opportunities of a dynamic technical frontier that must facilitate collaborations and operations at local, national, and international levels. At the same time, campus CI face common challenges regarding implementing viable and sustainable economic models. Within this dynamic and challenging environment, this workshop offers a rare opportunity to engage leaders from academia, industry, and funding agencies to share and contrast emerging CI challenges, opportunities, and solutions. Campus CI, while unique to an academic institution and reflective of different institutional priorities, often share common operating models, technical challenges, and financial realities. This workshop offers an innovative and agile leadership group the opportunity to anticipate, compare and contrast various approaches to common CI challenges and opportunities, both technical and economic. Topics of discussion include shifting research and education drivers and their infrastructure requirements; the role of state and federal agencies in CI funding; high-tech workforce and staff development; and, planning for a productive and efficient future at all levels of CI in the midst of growing infrastructure requirements, disruptive technologies, and increased competition for funding.
Campus cyberinfrastructure, while unique to an academic institution and reflective of different institutional priorities, often share common operating models, technical challenges, and economic realities. Cyberinfrastructure includes not only computing and data storage resources but also scientific instruments such as telescopes, gene sequencers, and distributed sensor networks. This workshop offers an innovative and agile group of U.S. cyberinfrastructure leaders an opportunity to anticipate, compare and contrast various approaches to the common challenges and opportunities in providing cyberinfrastructure services and resources, both technical and economic.
Today’s academic research institutions face two difficult and opposing challenges. The first is the growing need for infrastructure required to perform competitive research including but not limited to: computational and data analysis resources; new, more sensitive and accurate instrumentation; and an ever-increasing array of geographically distributed sensors. While funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health provide access to a tremendous set of national resources, there is still a great demand by researchers for access to infrastructure resources at their home institutions. For this reason the NSF-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project is actively working to find ways to facilitate the bridging of campus resources to national cyberinfrastructure. The second and opposing challenge is a reduction in infrastructure budgets at academic research institutions due to rising costs and growing competition for limited research funding. At the intersection of these two challenges is sustainability, requiring careful strategic investments balanced with measurable returns, increasingly expressed in dollars. This dilemma--the growing need for research cyberinfrastructure coupled with rising costs and decreasing funding sources--is a concern at all levels: institutional, state, regional, and national. This workshop will bring together researchers, research service providers, academic leaders with strategic decision-making authority, funding agencies, and industry in an open forum to discuss the challenges, opportunities, and both time-tested and emerging strategies for developing and maintaining sustainable funding and business models for academic cyberinfrastructure (CI) facilities. Intellectual Merit: Identifying and implementing sustainable funding and business models for supporting cyberinfrastructure is central to our nation’s competitiveness. In this information age with increasing demands for a highly technical workforce it is imperative that our academic institutions properly prepare the workforce of tomorrow. Doing so requires a clear understanding of the infrastructure requirements, technical skills, and strategies used by scientists and engineers to address our nation's most difficult research problems. Understanding the benefits and limitations of current approaches to these difficult problems, as well as how disruptive technologies such as cloud computing may play a supporting role, is an essential part of strategic CI planning. Broader Impacts: Those attending the workshop--including academic researchers, infrastructure service providers, and administrative leadership, along with representatives from federal funding agencies--will discuss current research challenges and infrastructure costs, and develop and share strategies to address them. These discussions and presentations will be recorded and made available via the workshop web site so that other institutions can learn from them on-demand, and identify strategies that may work for them. The desired result is to help increase the sustainability, and the number, of academic cyberinfrastructure facilities in the U.S., including those in economically disadvantaged areas of the country.
